Okay, so... why? For storytelling purposes (and leaving loyalism to STID aside for the moment), is the rule that the protagonists should be relatable as human and mortal a bad one? What's the gain in terms of storytelling compared to the cost?

Magic blood or transwarp beaming simply doesn't bother me in the slightest. And it won't bother me if neither are brought up in the next Trek movie. Star Trek, while having regular characters, was really something of an anthology series. So many technologies came and went without having any effect on the larger universe.

Psycho tricorders that were infallible when it came to telling if someone was lying? We never heard of them again. Sentient androids? Data was a big thing nearly a hundred years later. Wide beam stun phasers from orbit? Never heard about those again. The engines being supped up by the Kelvin's to make the intergalactic crossing in three-hundred years? Never heard of those either.

Protomatter and Trilithium got name drops but never figured prominently in stories again. Neither did the Genesis Device which would've been a potent weapon against the Borg. Even the gas that was corrosive to organic compounds? Never heard from again.

Star Trek is chock full of game changing tech that comes and goes as the story needs dictate. Why should it change now?

But I guess the question is how they ended up dead in the first place.

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I think (if I recall correctly) the implication was that the tech had failed due to how old it was when the Enterprise found it. Super human or not, being put in to suspended animation and not brought back out right probably could kill a person. McCoy seemed concerned about that in ID.

Okay, so... why? For storytelling purposes (and leaving loyalism to STID aside for the moment), is the rule that the protagonists should be relatable as human and mortal a bad one? What's the gain in terms of storytelling compared to the cost?

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I find mutagenic blood more believable.

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It honestly felt borrowed from the X-Men to me.

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I definitely do not agree, as the idea of a serum or vial of blood containing healing properties has been around for ages. That said, even if it is, the X-Men franchise has borrowed heavily from gods knows how many sources when making its films and building its mythos.

Hell, the idea of teleporters has been around for ages, but don't you notice how amazingly similar the stasis devices in Forbidden Planet look to the Trek transporter? Keep in mind that Gene openly stated how he borrowed from film classics and television shows when making the Star Trek universe.

I definitely do not agree, as the idea of a serum or vial of blood containing healing properties has been around for ages.

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The idea of blood that magically regenerates things is pure X-Men. The idea of a serum is on the other hand quite common and would presumably be known in the Trek universe, which is exactly what makes giving them X-Men blood to make into serums seem so stupid, because it effectively cures death. And that's bad.

(I'm assuming they'll find some workaround for this in the next movie, like Augment blood turning you evil or something. But for my money it was clunky and unnecessary in the first place.)

Tuvok and Neelix went from existing to not existing back to existing how is that not dying and coming back from death.

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Picard went from being assimilated to not-assimilated and back again. How is that not dying and coming back from death? The answer is that synthesis isn't death, no more for him that it was for Tuvok and Neelix. (This incidentally is precisely why the writers have Janeway re-separate them at the end; because they're still alive and she's rescuing them, just as she would with any other transporter accident.)

Also, can we not do a thing where we parade through every fracking example of a transporter accident or malfunction in the canon and try to pretend it's the equivalent of resurrection? You have to know a point is weak when you're reduced to digging up Tuvix.

I definitely do not agree, as the idea of a serum or vial of blood containing healing properties has been around for ages.

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The idea of blood that magically regenerates things is pure X-Men. The idea of a serum is on the other hand quite common and would presumably be known in the Trek universe, which is exactly what makes giving them X-Men blood to make into serums seem so stupid, because it effectively cures death. And that's bad.

(I'm assuming they'll find some workaround for this in the next movie, like Augment blood turning you evil or something. But for my money it was clunky and unnecessary in the first place.)

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No, it's not "pure X-Men", just as traveling at faster than light speeds through space isn't "pure Forbidden Planet". You know, if only McCoy knew that the serum he created to reverse the deadly disease in "Miri" was actually just a rip-off of X-Men.

No, it's not "pure X-Men", just as traveling at faster than light speeds through space isn't "pure Forbidden Planet". You know, if only McCoy knew that the serum he created to reverse the deadly disease in "Miri" was actually just a rip-off of X-Men.

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You know, I'm not going to belabour how the false comparison with "Miri" is just as problematic as your false comparison of Thomas Riker to resurrection... apart from noting the incredibly obvious fact that Bones' serum in Miri was a cure for a specific disease, not a general cure for death*; it being quite obviously the idea of blood-that-cures-everything that is X-Men, not the idea of serums. Oh look, I'm belabouring it after all. But I'm done now.

You're a good egg regardless.

[* But here's an idea: instead of arguing about whether there should have been magic blood, since we already know where we stand on that, we could argue about where they could or should take the concept. There was a TNG episode, for instance, that revolved around how an attempt to make the perfect immune system -- one that went out and attacked diseases instead of just waiting for them, like some pussified liberal immune system -- unwittingly produced a new and worse disorder. Maybe that's a potential tack. ]

"Why don't we synthesise more of Khan's blood?"
"Well turns out without some of his other genetic enhancements, repeated production of his blood cell type would kill your bone marrow."
"So...bad then?"
"Pretty much."

We'll likely never hear about the magic blood again. Unless it turns up in the novels.

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That is a good thing... Of all the ways to magically save Kirk, that was a really annoyingly dumb one.

So let's move on and put that in the "That's why your people were conquered Spock" category.

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The magic blood didn't really bother me. No more than being able to reverse aging with the transporter. Seems like there'd be a heck of a market out there for some Ferengi, providing storage space for transporter traces for people when they are twenty-years old, when they start to age, they just go through the transporter. Seems like Starfleet would do the same thing for when their people were critically injured or contracted incurable diseases. The transporter should have ended medicine as we know it.